The suit-speak translation is: "Hey. We actually talked to the network guys about two days before we were going to push this out the door and told them what they requirements were and they downed a 2 liter of Dew, gave us some funny looks, then laughed maniacally and twisted in their office chairs, chanting 'More power, more power, more power...' Also, the legal department said the brain implants into the engineers were rejected and they refused to further refine our new hideous DRM. In light of these developments, we're going to release some screenshots and do a hand wave."
A researcher on the team suggests the finding could have considerable implications in the world of criminal justice, where such scans could one day be presented as evidence in a trial.
My response:
"There is a tendency... today to explain human behavior, to remove purpose - motive - from serious consideration. We tend to accept the notion that mechanical, not purposive, causation accounts for the things people do. Joe Sinister is a criminal because his parents beat him or because of a chemical imbalance in his brain or because of a genetic disorder that removed the function we call conscience... These explanations of human behavior may be accurate... but the issue of accuracy is, in fact, quite irrelevant to human societies. A human community that uses mechanical causation to account for human behavior cannot survive, because it cannot hold its members accountable for their behavior. That is, no matter how you account for the origin of a human behavior, a community must continue to judge the perpetrator on the basis of his intent, as near as that intent can be understood (or guessed, or assumed). That is why parents inevitably ask their children the unanswerable question: Why did you do that? Terrible as that question is, it at least puts the responsibility back on the child's head and forces the child to ask himself the question that society absolutely requires him to answer: Why do I do the things I do? And how, by changing my motives, can I change my behavior?... We must believe in motives for human behavior, or we cannot maintain community life." ~ Orson Scott Card, from the Introduction to "Cruel Miracles".
They make it sound like this was done by criminals. Who's to say it wasn't really a job offer in disguise?;) "First person here to notice this gets a job offer."
In order to turn things around we need to get rid of the G.E.D. and let kids know that if they drop out they will live in poverty and follow that up by demonstrating that we are more than willing to toss kids out of school. That may sound cruel but it could stop the current loss of lives and futures that now are consequences of a broken educational system.
So your solution to the broken educational system is to force everyone to use it? The problem with institutions is that they are a "one size fits all" solution. If you happen to be rich and the solution (public education) doesn't fit, you can buy yourself one that does. But if you're poor, your only alternative is self-education. A method you propose we remove, thus dooming anyone who is both poor and a bad fit with public education to menial labor?
My tax dollars are being used for the Department of Homeland Security to investigate subversive books? Is this a repeat from the 60s? Do they, in fact, have in their hand a list of known communist supporters? Seriously, the only nice thing I can say about the DHS is that I'm not getting all the government I'm paying for.
If you want to subvert that, you have to convince that entity that you are trust worthy. If you have a decentralized system, you could have 1000 entities controlling trust. That's 9999 more chances you have to trick someone.
Yes, and compromising any one entity results in a 1/m damage, where m is the member count. The benefit here is that the number of compromises a person can make in a trust network before discovery (the risk) is exponential, not linear -- that is to say, two people are more than twice as likely to discover the subversion from a single source.
If you ask me, networks of trust such as PGP are far more difficult to compromise than a central authority. Anything centralized is going to have only a handful of people, who are easy to find, and being private citizens, easily compromised. On the other hand, an integrated cryptographic interface where anyone can vouch for the authenticity of a site, ie; a reputation-based evaluation schema, would be (relatively speaking) more secure.
I have a reputation amongst my friends and family of being "tech savvy". They trust my advice on technology. If that advice could be included in a database an integrated directly into the browser, then others they know that are also "tech savvy" (and trust) could inform their browsing actions much more than a single profit-orientated organization. I could, for example, add "l0pht industries" to my list of trustees, or "Bruce Schneider"... Or even "Rob Malda", and those people would become part of the trust network that my friends would then rely on. This is where the technology should go -- but because it conflicts with monied interests and in a capitalist society it is only the dollar value of a thing that makes our institutions protect it, it probably never will.
Trust is really the central issue, not cryptography. Cryptography enables us to extend our trust relationships into the digital world.
If I compromise any layer 2 device on any network between you and the destination, not only can I fake the address, I can have it doing 480 spins in a pink tutu. Have you read any of the reports from the major network access points around the world? Bogus packets pass through them all the time. They even have a name for them -- martian packets.
476 out of the 500 supercomputers on the Top500 list were manufactured in the United States.
Yeah right! I don't think a single PC has been manufactured, assembled, and shipped from this country in which every component was dug out of the ground, refined, processed, manufactured, packaged, assembled, and distributed, from this country-- Not in a long time. That said, if Russia's so damned worried about our CPU designers, why not recruit a few? I know of at least one that quit the x86 development team from Intel muttering something about "not dealing with a unit of time smaller than a season" after having some nanosecond glitches in a core he was designing... He sounds like a guy who could use a stiff drink. I'm sure you can deliver, Russia.
Why do the credentials matter?
on
Tetraktys
·
· Score: 1
Many of you saw The Matrix, despite the people behind it lacking a degree in Artificial Intelligence. You all went and saw Transformers, and (might) have enjoyed it. And let's not get started on how many movies are gutted at Bad Astronomy... And yet, despite this, we watch them anyway and enjoy them, despite the technical inconsistencies and writers lacking in super-special-awesome credentials of doom. Odds are, if you're reading this, you don't have those credentials either.
P.S. Totally posted this from the console of a Gibson.:P
They predicted something around 97 billion e-mails per day sent in 2007. I wouldn't want to guess what it's at today, but it's probably higher. Regardless, 0.3% of the emails equates to about 291 million legitimate emails per day black holing. No errors. No "marked return to sender". It just vanishes, eaten by the shub internet. Oops. And we can be pretty sure those numbers are higher -- this is a back of the envelope analysis.
before all these social networking rantings came through to haunt/hurt us in real life....folks dont seem to understand that the internet is a serious place with actions having far reaching effects
... And that's not okay. We're living in a digital world. We need forums to express ourselves to some people, but not others. If the technology makes this difficult or impractical, then we need to adjust our social expectations to embrace this, not exclude it. This is the only way to move forward in the digital world with any kind of strength. Otherwise, we risk becoming a society of deaf mutes.
My post said "almost" any reason. You can't be fired for a 'protected' reason like race, sex, religion, etc. You can be fired for having blonde hair, however, or being unattractive. And most employers in "at will" states get around the protection by simply not specifying the reason.
...a Chicago landlord suing a tenant over a tweet complaining of mold in her apartment.
Was there mold? Because if there was, it's perfectly legal and the landlord can shove those papers right where the sun don't shine, and she might be able to file a countersuit and win.
The aide, Lee Landor, who had been the deputy press secretary to the Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer, since May, posted comments on her Facebook page criticizing Mr. Gates and the president, whom she referred to at one point as "O-dumb-a."
If these comments were made public for anyone to view, then they might have something -- a press secretary should know better. If this was something posted privately to her friends and word leaked out, then I would say she excercised poor judgment -- but her employer did worse by firing her over it instead of a reprimand. People make mistakes -- Good managers understand that and work to correct the behavior. Bad managers paper over their own asses, and wind up costing their company/organization both human resources and morale. Legally, however, in the United States most states are "at will" employment, which basically means you have no rights whatsoever -- you can be fired for almost any reason, or none at all, without any recourse. This is one of the problems (some would say benefits) of living in the only first world country that lacks a strong labour party.
On a different note -- it's amazing how petty most people are. For example, I think you are a pompous bastard child of a whore. Curiously, I have no idea who you (the reader) are, but nevertheless, someone, somewhere, will be offended. Apparently, when people go online, they forget the social etiquette lessons they learned in grade school -- namely to ignore bullies, loud-mouths, and to have a thick skin, because there are not enough bullets in the world to kill every assh0le you're going to meet.
...the game (which of course requires Silverlight to run) shows users a webpage and asks them to figure out a search query that should produce the page within the first 5 results.
Gee, that sounds SO much more fun than playing the Sims! Not. reCAPTCHA works only because the user wants to get to what's after it, and doesn't require another downloaded plugin or frequent interaction. Guys, learn one of the great rules in IT: Just because it can be done, doesn't mean it should. If you want to investigate user behavior, do what everybody else in the industry has done -- install malware onto the user's machines and track their habits.:\
So the personal computer is turning 30? Hmmm, time to bake a deathday cake. Because now the computer's matured to the point where it won't go out clubbing anymore, it can't wear the latest fashions without getting looks from the younger technologies, and it's expected to lose it's cutting-edge angstyness in favor of becoming more respectable and modest. Balls.
Sure a stand alone solar farm cannot compete with a reactor but we were not talking about stand alone solar farms. The roofs of Germany pump over a GW of excess back onto the grid. If the electric companies in the US don't feel threatened by every rooftop in the land generating solar power then why do they object to the idea of feedback tarrifs?
82 million people's roofs, and between all of them they only manage a single GW of power. Lame.
The study indicates that even though practitioners are most concerned about email phishing and securing mobile devices, technologies addressing these needs are at risk of being cut from IT budgets.
A fat budget won't help you buy what you need to fix this problem: Smarter users.
It's a conspiracy! Or... maybe it's just that the definition for the virus in question was rushed out the door without adequate testing. How many new viruses are reported each week again? They probably don't "beta test" their definitions, and just do it in a lab. Oops. The lab machines didn't have iTunes.
I'm getting real tired of this attitude. My generation isn't stupid. They know what they're doing -- they're creating a transparent society where we can all be a bit more polite to one another because everyone has dirt on everyone else, and because we want to put ourselves out there and make friends, rather than dying alone in some castle with all our toys like the boomers are right now, because they wanted their precious privacy. We actually want a gender and color-blind society, built on freedom and transparency -- and we're doing just that. Oh, the humanity! The only thing this generation regrets is that management is generally 40+ and thinks that because someone doesn't have their personal information out there, they're somehow better qualified. Which is about the only thing I hear people worrying about with their online profiles -- not whether their friends, or even their own mother, or pastor, or old high school teacher, finds out about those drunken photos. But the boomers, and their outdated notions of privacy and freedom, will die before us. This is why I'm glad people don't live forever... new ideas would never have a chance if we did.
Slashdot Mirror
The suit-speak translation is: "Hey. We actually talked to the network guys about two days before we were going to push this out the door and told them what they requirements were and they downed a 2 liter of Dew, gave us some funny looks, then laughed maniacally and twisted in their office chairs, chanting 'More power, more power, more power...' Also, the legal department said the brain implants into the engineers were rejected and they refused to further refine our new hideous DRM. In light of these developments, we're going to release some screenshots and do a hand wave."
A researcher on the team suggests the finding could have considerable implications in the world of criminal justice, where such scans could one day be presented as evidence in a trial.
My response:
"There is a tendency... today to explain human behavior, to remove purpose - motive - from serious consideration. We tend to accept the notion that mechanical, not purposive, causation accounts for the things people do. Joe Sinister is a criminal because his parents beat him or because of a chemical imbalance in his brain or because of a genetic disorder that removed the function we call conscience... These explanations of human behavior may be accurate... but the issue of accuracy is, in fact, quite irrelevant to human societies. A human community that uses mechanical causation to account for human behavior cannot survive, because it cannot hold its members accountable for their behavior. That is, no matter how you account for the origin of a human behavior, a community must continue to judge the perpetrator on the basis of his intent, as near as that intent can be understood (or guessed, or assumed). That is why parents inevitably ask their children the unanswerable question: Why did you do that? Terrible as that question is, it at least puts the responsibility back on the child's head and forces the child to ask himself the question that society absolutely requires him to answer: Why do I do the things I do? And how, by changing my motives, can I change my behavior?... We must believe in motives for human behavior, or we cannot maintain community life."
~ Orson Scott Card, from the Introduction to "Cruel Miracles".
They make it sound like this was done by criminals. Who's to say it wasn't really a job offer in disguise? ;) "First person here to notice this gets a job offer."
In order to turn things around we need to get rid of the G.E.D. and let kids know that if they drop out they will live in poverty and follow that up by demonstrating that we are more than willing to toss kids out of school. That may sound cruel but it could stop the current loss of lives and futures that now are consequences of a broken educational system.
So your solution to the broken educational system is to force everyone to use it? The problem with institutions is that they are a "one size fits all" solution. If you happen to be rich and the solution (public education) doesn't fit, you can buy yourself one that does. But if you're poor, your only alternative is self-education. A method you propose we remove, thus dooming anyone who is both poor and a bad fit with public education to menial labor?
Wow. Is your entire wardrobe brown?
My tax dollars are being used for the Department of Homeland Security to investigate subversive books? Is this a repeat from the 60s? Do they, in fact, have in their hand a list of known communist supporters? Seriously, the only nice thing I can say about the DHS is that I'm not getting all the government I'm paying for.
Is this like monopoly? I tend to lose not long after I have to start mortgaging my properties to the bank.
A lone geek runs into the middle of the forum, screaming "vi forever! Praise the hex codes!" *boom* :)
If you want to subvert that, you have to convince that entity that you are trust worthy. If you have a decentralized system, you could have 1000 entities controlling trust. That's 9999 more chances you have to trick someone.
Yes, and compromising any one entity results in a 1/m damage, where m is the member count. The benefit here is that the number of compromises a person can make in a trust network before discovery (the risk) is exponential, not linear -- that is to say, two people are more than twice as likely to discover the subversion from a single source.
If you ask me, networks of trust such as PGP are far more difficult to compromise than a central authority. Anything centralized is going to have only a handful of people, who are easy to find, and being private citizens, easily compromised. On the other hand, an integrated cryptographic interface where anyone can vouch for the authenticity of a site, ie; a reputation-based evaluation schema, would be (relatively speaking) more secure.
I have a reputation amongst my friends and family of being "tech savvy". They trust my advice on technology. If that advice could be included in a database an integrated directly into the browser, then others they know that are also "tech savvy" (and trust) could inform their browsing actions much more than a single profit-orientated organization. I could, for example, add "l0pht industries" to my list of trustees, or "Bruce Schneider"... Or even "Rob Malda", and those people would become part of the trust network that my friends would then rely on. This is where the technology should go -- but because it conflicts with monied interests and in a capitalist society it is only the dollar value of a thing that makes our institutions protect it, it probably never will.
Trust is really the central issue, not cryptography. Cryptography enables us to extend our trust relationships into the digital world.
oh ye of little knowledge.
If I compromise any layer 2 device on any network between you and the destination, not only can I fake the address, I can have it doing 480 spins in a pink tutu. Have you read any of the reports from the major network access points around the world? Bogus packets pass through them all the time. They even have a name for them -- martian packets.
476 out of the 500 supercomputers on the Top500 list were manufactured in the United States.
Yeah right! I don't think a single PC has been manufactured, assembled, and shipped from this country in which every component was dug out of the ground, refined, processed, manufactured, packaged, assembled, and distributed, from this country-- Not in a long time. That said, if Russia's so damned worried about our CPU designers, why not recruit a few? I know of at least one that quit the x86 development team from Intel muttering something about "not dealing with a unit of time smaller than a season" after having some nanosecond glitches in a core he was designing... He sounds like a guy who could use a stiff drink. I'm sure you can deliver, Russia.
Many of you saw The Matrix, despite the people behind it lacking a degree in Artificial Intelligence. You all went and saw Transformers, and (might) have enjoyed it. And let's not get started on how many movies are gutted at Bad Astronomy... And yet, despite this, we watch them anyway and enjoy them, despite the technical inconsistencies and writers lacking in super-special-awesome credentials of doom. Odds are, if you're reading this, you don't have those credentials either.
P.S. Totally posted this from the console of a Gibson. :P
You can't complete a TCP 3-way handshake from a fake address...
Oh ye of little faith....
0.3 percent false positive
They predicted something around 97 billion e-mails per day sent in 2007. I wouldn't want to guess what it's at today, but it's probably higher. Regardless, 0.3% of the emails equates to about 291 million legitimate emails per day black holing. No errors. No "marked return to sender". It just vanishes, eaten by the shub internet. Oops. And we can be pretty sure those numbers are higher -- this is a back of the envelope analysis.
before all these social networking rantings came through to haunt/hurt us in real life....folks dont seem to understand that the internet is a serious place with actions having far reaching effects
... And that's not okay. We're living in a digital world. We need forums to express ourselves to some people, but not others. If the technology makes this difficult or impractical, then we need to adjust our social expectations to embrace this, not exclude it. This is the only way to move forward in the digital world with any kind of strength. Otherwise, we risk becoming a society of deaf mutes.
My post said "almost" any reason. You can't be fired for a 'protected' reason like race, sex, religion, etc. You can be fired for having blonde hair, however, or being unattractive. And most employers in "at will" states get around the protection by simply not specifying the reason.
...a Chicago landlord suing a tenant over a tweet complaining of mold in her apartment.
Was there mold? Because if there was, it's perfectly legal and the landlord can shove those papers right where the sun don't shine, and she might be able to file a countersuit and win.
The aide, Lee Landor, who had been the deputy press secretary to the Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer, since May, posted comments on her Facebook page criticizing Mr. Gates and the president, whom she referred to at one point as "O-dumb-a."
If these comments were made public for anyone to view, then they might have something -- a press secretary should know better. If this was something posted privately to her friends and word leaked out, then I would say she excercised poor judgment -- but her employer did worse by firing her over it instead of a reprimand. People make mistakes -- Good managers understand that and work to correct the behavior. Bad managers paper over their own asses, and wind up costing their company/organization both human resources and morale. Legally, however, in the United States most states are "at will" employment, which basically means you have no rights whatsoever -- you can be fired for almost any reason, or none at all, without any recourse. This is one of the problems (some would say benefits) of living in the only first world country that lacks a strong labour party.
On a different note -- it's amazing how petty most people are. For example, I think you are a pompous bastard child of a whore. Curiously, I have no idea who you (the reader) are, but nevertheless, someone, somewhere, will be offended. Apparently, when people go online, they forget the social etiquette lessons they learned in grade school -- namely to ignore bullies, loud-mouths, and to have a thick skin, because there are not enough bullets in the world to kill every assh0le you're going to meet.
...the game (which of course requires Silverlight to run) shows users a webpage and asks them to figure out a search query that should produce the page within the first 5 results.
Gee, that sounds SO much more fun than playing the Sims! Not. reCAPTCHA works only because the user wants to get to what's after it, and doesn't require another downloaded plugin or frequent interaction. Guys, learn one of the great rules in IT: Just because it can be done, doesn't mean it should. If you want to investigate user behavior, do what everybody else in the industry has done -- install malware onto the user's machines and track their habits. :\
So the personal computer is turning 30? Hmmm, time to bake a deathday cake. Because now the computer's matured to the point where it won't go out clubbing anymore, it can't wear the latest fashions without getting looks from the younger technologies, and it's expected to lose it's cutting-edge angstyness in favor of becoming more respectable and modest. Balls.
Sure a stand alone solar farm cannot compete with a reactor but we were not talking about stand alone solar farms. The roofs of Germany pump over a GW of excess back onto the grid. If the electric companies in the US don't feel threatened by every rooftop in the land generating solar power then why do they object to the idea of feedback tarrifs?
82 million people's roofs, and between all of them they only manage a single GW of power. Lame.
The study indicates that even though practitioners are most concerned about email phishing and securing mobile devices, technologies addressing these needs are at risk of being cut from IT budgets.
A fat budget won't help you buy what you need to fix this problem: Smarter users.
Are you some kind of market droid? Because your post is COMPLETELY OFF TOPIC.
"I see that you're trying to celebrate a birthday. Would you like help with tha--aARAGGGHHH!"
Another satisfied customer discovers the joy of killing Clippy for his/her birthday.
It's a conspiracy! Or... maybe it's just that the definition for the virus in question was rushed out the door without adequate testing. How many new viruses are reported each week again? They probably don't "beta test" their definitions, and just do it in a lab. Oops. The lab machines didn't have iTunes.
I'm getting real tired of this attitude. My generation isn't stupid. They know what they're doing -- they're creating a transparent society where we can all be a bit more polite to one another because everyone has dirt on everyone else, and because we want to put ourselves out there and make friends, rather than dying alone in some castle with all our toys like the boomers are right now, because they wanted their precious privacy. We actually want a gender and color-blind society, built on freedom and transparency -- and we're doing just that. Oh, the humanity! The only thing this generation regrets is that management is generally 40+ and thinks that because someone doesn't have their personal information out there, they're somehow better qualified. Which is about the only thing I hear people worrying about with their online profiles -- not whether their friends, or even their own mother, or pastor, or old high school teacher, finds out about those drunken photos. But the boomers, and their outdated notions of privacy and freedom, will die before us. This is why I'm glad people don't live forever... new ideas would never have a chance if we did.